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On the Aurora, Colorado Shooting: Mobilizing Terror

The natural responses to the murder of at least a dozen moviegoers shot at a midnight screening of The Dark Knight Rises, in Colorado, are so evident—sympathetic grief, political disgust—that, if one is to write on the subject at all, one risks saying things that are either already said better by others closer to the subject, or are willfully and offensively marginal. But to the extent that the venue of the massacre is at all relevant to our understanding of it, I do feel a bit compelled to speak. (That someone went on a shooting spree in a movie theater seems to have made a number of movie critics, either willingly or reluctantly, into experts on grief counseling and gun laws. I suppose it’s impossible to talk about violence in our culture, a subject upon which recent events beg a movie critic’s response, without talking about these things, but I’m still wary of appearing presumptuous.) And in any case, it seems to me that the actions of one James Holmes, at Aurora, Colorado’s Century 16 last week, are wrapped up in the movies in ways that are inevitable, and genuinely problematic, though only up to a point.

In his comprehensive Cinema Scopereview of the film and its surrounding culture, Michael Sicinski writes that “many of us can conceive of cinema only as the Will to Power.” He means, I think, to suggest that the ugly tone of the film’s pre-release hype, with comments-section vigilantes promising to firebomb houses and do assorted other violences to heretics of the Bat-Gospel, is not so easily severable from the obliterating spectacle of Nolan’s Batmovies (or other similar films).

In bringing the fanboy firebombing thing up in the current context, it’s not that I, or anyone else, needs or even wants (honest!) to “draw a connection” between the spuming violent fantasies of fans of a violent movie, and a violent fantasy that was actually realized (though people should generally think about what makes them different from the truly despicable, and try not to behave in a such a way as to complicate that difference). But the notion of “cinema… as the will to power” is intriguing.

“Event movies” do often achieve their status by “mobilizing”—to borrow a military term from Nic Rapold’s L Mag Dark Knight Risesreview—the resources of large-scale filmmaking and corporate cultural currency. Thinking about art as will to power, I think about Don DeLillo, in Mao II, talking about terrorism and the novel, the way in which art and disruptive violence can similarly command the public imagination. And indeed, now that competition is so stiff, movies, really important movies, don’t just blow stuff up any more. The public spectacle hijacked by mass violence is itself a frequent trope of the ambitious action film, which seeks to hoist itself into the national conversation not just through brute force but with a bit of scary relevance for extra leverage.

Often, the public spectacle in question is a football game: in John Frankenheimer’s Black Sunday, or the Tom Clancy adaptation The Sum of All Fears. Another such scene was among those released months ago, to stoke anticipation for The Dark Knight Rises itself. (Indeed, much of the power and relevance of Nolan’s Bat-movies is in their own spectacle’s explicit if not particularly coherent allegorical parallels with contemporary terror.)

When movies do this—when movies demonstrate their own potency as spectacle by folding rival spectacles into their address to us—it’s a commentary on, but not necessarily a critique of, their ability to do what they depict, to compel our attention with global reach and aesthetic persuasion. Ripping from the headlines to help put across a fictional spectacle is also an inversion of how terrorism works, which is by harnessing large crowds, and larger broadcast audiences, to burrow into our narrative. Last week in Colorado, a man tried to do what terrorists do, what movies do, what terrorists in movies do, not least terrorists in Nolan’s Batman movies: to violently claim authorship of our public dreaming. (To incept us?) To turn the witnesses to spectacle into its props.

One Comment

How about this? With a few minor variations, Holmes unleashed his madness with the same determined zealotry as an Islamic suicide bomber/mass murderer. So there’s plenty of psychological terrain to work with.

But when it comes to murder in the US, only a very, very tiny percentage fall into the same category of mass murder as this tragedy. In terms of the numbers, killings similar to this one amount to a rounding error in the annual carnage — which totals about 16,000 homicides a year.

Meanwhile, it’s not likely future movie-goers have anything to worry about. Few of these crimes catch on and become a trend. Some years ago, there was a mass murder at a McDonalds in San Ysidro, CA. I believe a woman was the shooter. At a different time there was another mass shooting at a Luby’s Cafeteria in Texas. Seems to me some brave people overpowered the killer and stopped him.

But if it’s your desire to avoid shooting galleries, then stay away from backyard barbeques in black neighborhoods. At those gatherings there’s a steady stream of death every summer.